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OpenTable Bringing Restaurant Sites Mobile Booking

By Glenn Collins October 16, 2012 8:00 amOctober 16, 2012 8:00 am

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To boost online restaurant reservations and keep pace with mobile technology, OpenTable, the largest online reservation system, is offering to upgrade restaurant Web sites that are part of its paying membership. The upgrade will make it easier for customers to book tables using their phones.

Matt Roberts, chief executive of OpenTable, said that most reservations are still booked by phoning a restaurant; 12 percent are booked on line. But of those, he said, “there has been a tremendous shift toward mobile bookings – 28 percent from mobile phones, smartphones and tablets – when we were at 100 percent on desktops only four years ago.”

OpenTable has hired DudaMobile, a Palo Alto, Calif., site developer, to do mobile upgrades for the Web sites of 25,000 restaurants in the United States, Canada and England that pay OpenTable for its reservation service.

The mobile upgrade is free, though restaurants will pay 25 cents for seats filled from reservations that derive from mobile phones, he said. The company charges the 25,000 restaurants that are its customers a $199 per month subscription fee and a one-time software “setup” fee that ranges from $200 to $700. In addition, restaurants pay OpenTable $1 for each seat filled from its Web site, and 25 cents for reservations that come through the restaurants’ own sites using OpenTable’s system, which is free to diners.

OpenTable is paid to provide software to many companies that offer reservation sites, including MenuPages, Chowhound, Yelp, Google and Zagat. Last year the company had revenues of $139 million, and OpenTable’s “run rate” was 108 million, meaning that it seated that many diners, which amounts to 9 million people per month.